Carry on Abroad - The Return of the Package Holiday - Real Life, Real Spain

OR - The Bikini That Changed Spain: How the Package Holiday Conquered the Costas!

OR - Bikinis, Benidorm & Brits Abroad: How Tourism Changed Spain

How did Spain go from a buttoned-up dictatorship suspicious of bikinis to one of the world's great holiday destinations — and have we now loved it a little too much?

In this summer repeat of Spanish Practices, I travel back to the birth of the great British package holiday, when guaranteed sunshine, cheap sangria and a week on the Costa suddenly became affordable to ordinary British families.

There's the extraordinary story of the Mayor of Benidorm, a Vespa and the bikini that helped change Spanish tourism; memories of those tantalising 1970s holiday brochures; my own childhood disappointment at swapping the promised glamour of Majorca for a trip to Maldon; and the unstoppable rise of the Brits-abroad package holiday.

But then we come back to Spain today.

More than 90 million visitors, packed cities and beaches, holiday rentals, housing shortages and increasingly vocal protests against overtourism. Has the industry that transformed modern Spain finally become too successful?

From Franco to foreign tourists, Butlin's to Benidorm and the Costa del Bikini to "Tourists Go Home" — it's the extraordinary story of how the package holiday changed Spain, Britain and our relationship with the summer sun.

Spanish Practices – Real Life, Real Spain.

Revised repeat. AI disclosure - no AI used in this episode.